Back in January, Circuit City announced ceasing all operations, so we thought it would be interesting to analyze which retailers have benefited from their exit in the market. The brand Circuit City is very well known and drove a significant share of searches from consumers using the name to navigate. As a result of the website and store closings, the share of visits that are going to the Circuit City website that included a search term from a portfolio of Circuit City’s branded terms have declined from 87% during the week of Christmas to 68% for the week ending April 4, 2009. Among Circuit City’s former competitors in the electronics arena, the main beneficiaries of the Circuit City searches are Radioshack.com and Bestbuy.com.

Both of the retailers are receiving the search traffic from the portfolio of branded terms in opposite ways. For Radioshack.com, 100% of the traffic from the Circuit City Terms was from paid search over the 4 weeks ending April 4, 2009. With Bestbuy.com, all of the search traffic was driven by organic search results during the same timeframe.

While Circuitcity.com continues to receive visits as the results of searches and other sources, the only content on the website is the message about the store closings. Once they reach that message, visitors often move on to other retailers to look for products. Here there are also two retailers who are the main beneficiaries of the traffic from Circuitcity.com, Bestbuy.com and Walmart.com. During the week of April 4, 2009, Bestbuy.com captured 20% of the downstream traffic from CircuitCity.com and Walmart.com followed with close to 10%. Kmart.com and Sears.com each captured 4% and 2%, respectively.